ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways that the Greek and Turkish Left attempted to play an active role in the politics of their respective countries in the 1950s and 1960s by performing politics of memory. It shows that, for the Greek and Turkish Left, the Cyprus issue became a means of exposing and eventually delegitimising the dominant centrist domestic political establishment as collaborators of imperialism. The chapter examines the rhetoric of resistance as a 'mnemonic tradition' of the Left in Greece and Turkey that provided both the elements of continuity and of rupture through the Left's attempt to imbue the nation with new counter-hegemonic narratives. It attempts to demonstrate how the Greek and Turkish Left tried to create narratives about the nation in order to counter the dominant narratives of nationhood in their respective countries.
